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Primary care research funding sources
1Department of Family Practice, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor 48109-0708.
Background:
Numerous studies and anecdotal reports have identified lack of funding as a major obstacle to recruiting young physicians to academic medicine and to developing research in primary care. The focus of this study is the comparison of funding sources reported for published research in the primary care disciplines of family medicine, general internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology.
Methods:
Articles from a representative sample of the journals of each discipline were eligible for review and inclusion in the study if the work was an original research article. The eligible articles were reviewed and classified by specialty and by funding source. The reported funding sources were categorized into federal, private foundation, local, discipline specific, corporate, and none. After all of the articles had been categorized, 40 articles from each discipline that had not reported any funding source were randomly selected. The primary author of each study was then contacted by telephone for a structured interview to verify the absence of reported funding in the published study.
Results:
Eligible published articles used in this study numbered 319 in family medicine, 208 in general internal medicine, 522 in obstetrics and gynecology, and 888 in pediatrics. There was a statistical difference between the disciplines regarding the source of funding (chi 2 = 223.0, P less than .0001). Family medicine research was funded primarily by federal and discipline sources. Obstetrics and gynecology research was funded primarily by federal, private foundation, and corporate sources. General internal medicine research and pediatric research were funded primarily by federal and private foundation sources. The majority of the research articles in all four disciplines did not report any funding source.
Conclusions:
All four disciplines had diverse sources of funding with many similarities and relatively few differences. An important finding of the study was the amount of unfunded research conducted and published in these primary care disciplines.